I Went to a Movie Friday

On my day off on Friday I went to see a movie that I thought the previews looked like might be good. I saw "Super 8". The movie harkened back to the time when the period of the movie was actually set (1979), and in my opinion they did a good job making it look like it was 32 years ago (back when I was entering high school). The Spielberg touch was very evident giving the film an almost "E.T."/"Close Encounters" feel which I liked. Overall I'd say that the movie was worth seeing. What I didn't like was the alien. It was computer generated like many things are in movies these days. It's something that I detest and something that you can tell is obviously fake. It's not that I hate computer graphics, I don't, but mixing live action with CGI I find is rarely done well, and this movie was no exception. It would have been better if the entire movie was done in CGI, at least that way it would all match (AVATAR did a great job with CGI, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a great film and was totally computer animated). I prefer aliens in a live action movie to be done by live action actors (for instance: the Predator from the Predator movies and many of the aliens from the Alien movies, though not all of them, were done in live action.) It just goes to show that it's not impossible to make a live action alien being. Also, one reason why I hate the CGI stuff is that invariably they move so fast on the screen that its all just a blur anyway. (Oh great, I paid $whatever to goto a movie to see blurry stuff on the screen. No thanks. IE: Transformers movies do that like every 5 seconds-blurry scene, blurry scene, blurry scene=wow what fun, not). It's a shame, but unfortunately I doubt that it will get any better anytime soon.